475 employees go to work in the morning and work pretty damn hard at getting this done.
The problem is that it takes 90% of their time to make 10% of the game.
That 10% is the core basics such as flight models, animations, physics, interactions, networking, game mechanics, all the core features that are needed to make the game actually work.
Once these features are in, things will move really fast.
Game development time frames, in chart form, is not a straight line from bottom left to top right, its a curved line that accelerates upwards towards release.
When the basics get locked down, it will be very fast to simply generate entire planets, slap on 60-80 bases, create space stations anywhere with a push of a button.
Procedural generation took a massive amount of time to create, but once we got it, how fast can CIG spit out entire planets now? How about cities? We saw that here:
It took a long time to model and produce everything that allows them to click a bunch of squares and generate an entire city!
90% of the time to make 10% of the game.
The final 10% will make 90% of the game appear very fast.